Meeting the Meat

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In The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Douglas Adams posed a moral puzzle with a twist. If eating a sentient being is wrong, is it better or worse to eat one that actively wants to be eaten?

“May I urge you to consider my liver?” a clever, cow-like creature — engineered precisely for this purpose — asks a group of diners. “It must be very rich and tender by now,” it adds. “I’ve been force-feeding myself for months.”

Most intelligent animals, it seems fair to assume, would probably far rather you ate somebody else. Should their preference, though, make any